It has been proposed to provide a vehicular input device that includes an operation unit disposed at the hand side of a driver and a display unit disposed farther than the operation unit from the driver for improving operability.
For example, Patent Document 1 discloses a vehicular I/O (i.e., input and output) device that includes a display device arranged above an instrument panel, and an electrostatic capacity type touch pad arranged above a center console disposed between a driving seat and an assistant driver seat.
Since an operation performed by the above vehicular I/O device requires a driver to move his or her hand from the position of the driver's hand located at, for example, a steering wheel to a touch pad, which is greatly dissimilar to a display device in direction, the operation cannot be said as an intuitive operation on the display device. Moreover, a vertical input direction (i.e., vehicular front-back direction) to the input plane of the touch pad is different from a vertical input direction (i.e., vehicular up-down direction) on the surface of the display device, therefore, it is difficult to interpret the correspondence between an input operation and an input result displayed on the display device in response to the input operation.
[Patent Document 1] Japanese Patent No. 5124397